MICHAEL B. YEATS was an outsider from the start: taunted as a boy because his father was a poet, a nationalist among unionists at one school, an admirer of de Valera among Dev's most boorish critics at the next.
The poem his father had written for him was the first straw: "Bid a strong ghost stand at the head/That my Michael may sleep sound/Nor cry, nor turn in his bed/Till his morning meal come round."
He survived it. The rest was an apprenticeship for life in Fianna Fail, where colleagues - who admired his skills in the Seanad and the European Parliament-still saw him as an outsider.
He was, I suspect, a little like Erskine Childers: someone they were proud to have in their ranks even if they were not quite sure what to make of him. (What Childers made, to everyone's surprise, was a fine President.)
But in spite of his early experience - perhaps because of it - Michael B. Yeats turned out to be more resilient than colleagues and critics imagined. As this book shows, he had a sharper eye and wider vision than most of them.
At St Columba's he'd become friendly with Brian Faulkner; and they remained friends until Faulkner decided on a political career and felt that his prospects would be damaged by association with a Fianna Fail activist.
In Fianna Fail, Yeats discovered, it was the unionists who were all but invisible; they cropped up in Dev's speeches and in frequent discussions at the national executive, but only as "people who had been misled, no doubt temporarily. Once they realised how well we treated our local minority, they would gladly come in with us."
Yeats had joined the party under the influence of his mother, George, in the early 1940s. He was a regular cumann member, a modest and contented canvasser who accepted that electoral registers were too valuable to be entrusted to him.
Ten years later he watched at close quarters the struggles of another newcomer, Noel Browne, who confided that he found the party less restrictive than Clann na Phoblachta. Maybe so: it was before Sean MacEntee felt threatened by his popularity, complained of his socialist speeches and ensured that he was refused a Dail nomination.
Yeats himself was unimpressed by Browne's work rate but did his best to block MacEntee's cynical campaign. When he failed, Browne stood as an Independent and was expelled.
The chapter on Browne is one of many in which Yeats reveals his own humane thinking and casts some light on the operations of the party. Lemass was his hero, about whom he has an anecdote which might be described as a tale for our time. It is about Senator W.A. Sheldon of Donegal, who'd surprised everyone by voting with a minority Fianna Fail government in the 1950s.
Shortly afterwards he went to Lemass with a request on behalf of his most influential supporter. Lemass thought about it for a week and turned him down. Here was a minister, says Yeats, who was prepared to risk the life of the government rather than take a decision he believed to be wrong.
Those were the days.
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